Drop rates, loss runs and transparency

"kobe_juan_canobie;88883" wrote:
None of what follows is new, but I hope it encourages EA to have a think about how they handle artificially stochastic functions in the game, and gives some of you a bit more info about how to gain dropped gear strategically.

People spend money on this game. It's like a strategy game with gambling attached -- eg. shard and gear drop battles. Unlike reputable gambling sites however SWGOH does not tell you the probability of a win, or even make the drops Provably fair. An example of a provably fair online gambling site which provides clear odds and the house edge is the well known cryptocoin casino Just Dice

So, because of this lack of transparency I see lots of posts about unfair drop rates. This is probably partly due to an unknown drop rate, cognitive bias and unfamilirarity with expected win and loss runs in a set of geometrically distributed trials. It takes a great many trials to estimate a drop rate with reasonable accuracy, and even at higher drop rates you can hit quite long runs of losses - for example for a drop rate of 0.2 and in a series of a hundred wins you can expect your longest run of losses (before a win) to be between 14 and 37 (some easy papers on run length distributions here and here).

Those loss runs are pretty long and could be disheartening -- and experienced by a large number of players, given the amount of gear with drop rates of 0.2.

I think people either assume that the drop rates are much worse than they are, or believe that EA are playing silly buggers and varying the drop rates (eg giving a large number of successes just before you run out of crystals, and then making up for it with a large number of losses just after you purchase them). These beliefs are all probably due to cognitive bias and lack of transparency, but EA leave themselves open to accusations of cheating by not using any of available methods of proving fairness and by not providing accurate drop rates.

As my guild (BaseDeltaZero rocks wooo!) knows I have a new baby and my brain is reeling. I don't have time or brain power to do the usual sorts of non-swgoh analysis I did pre-baby at my blog, but I have just about enough IQ left to post an analysis of my drop rates, loss runs and win runs for the past fortnight. I also checked that in each case distribution of number of losses before a win fit the expected geometric distribution well enough to not reject that assumption as the null, and in each case they did. From this you could just as easily believe that EA is running a fair game, or they're being very subtle about cheating us. Make no mistake - our disbelief is their fault.

I'll post my actual results in other posts - this one is too long if I include them.